About

Ciara McMahon is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is realized through site specific performative installations, through paint, and through video. McMahon seeks the forgotten or the unacknowledged in our psyche and our society.  She is fascinated by how embodiment plays out between Self and NonSelf, how it is experienced both in private and within the wider sociopolitical society.  She is thus interested in the our contemporary community of things.

The body declares outside-language (and that’s the part of languages that’s exscribed). The body declares in such a way that, foreign to any interval and any detour of the sign, it announces absolutely everything (it announces itself absolutely), and its annunciation poses an obstacle for itself, absolutely (p115, Nancy, Jean Luc, Corpus, 2008).

McMahon’s solo exhibitions include Temporal Sequencing: Present Perfect Continuous, The Other Gallery,The Banff Center, Banff, Alberta (2011), Time to Remember, The Cline Space, The Banff Center, Alberta (2011), Liminality, NCAD Gallery (2011), Détruis Space, The Joinery (2009), Mutual:Esteem, SIN Nightclub (2009),The CrossOver Event, Mountjoy Prison (2008).

Selected group exhibitions include Weaponising Speculations, Block T, Dublin (2013), Augment, Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2012), What Kind of Old Do You Want to Be? Garter Lane Arts Center, Waterford (2012), The Art and Health, Bath Royal Science and Literacy Institution ( 2011), This is my Body, Birkbeck College, University of London (2011), Preface, Pallas Projects (2010), Summer Show, RUA Red, Tallaght (2010), 127th Annual Royal Ulster Academy Exhibition (2008).

McMahon was awarded the Adurey E. Klinck scholarship at the Banff Arts Centre, Canada (2011); Artist in the Community Award Phase 1 and 2 from CREATE (2010), Arts Council Travel and Training Award and DLR arts grants. She is a member of the AtHomeStudio group and is currently based in Dublin.

In 2012 McMahon founded the experimental hybrid art space deAppendix, which is co-located with a GP surgery, Blackrock, Dublin. She continues to act as the space’s Director and Curator.

Ciara McMahon gratefully acknowledges funding from the Arts Council of Ireland and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.